Basically AMD have chosen to stick with their older AMD64 based architecture paired up with an integrated GPU that can rival the midrange and a focus on batterylife. Given the most frequent needs for a laptop are cheap, good batterylife and some 3D performance AMD seem to be bang on with this new platform, while Intel's Sandybridge processors are faster on raw processor performance its platform is more expensive and needs a dedicated GPU to offer similar graphics performance which is yet more cost.

John

We are outnumbered by enemy titans, recommend aggressive sustained counterfire

I don't think there's anything old about wanting good batterylife, even my little TX which is my oldest laptop still in use (six years or more?) is packing its 13,000Mah extended battery just as my XPS M1330, XPS 1640 and Vaio Z5 all are.

I think Intel made a big mistake marketing their CULV (Consumer Ultra Low Voltage) processors as did the companies using them. They were the standard Core architecture but lower clockspeeds (around 1.4Ghz) for the same price as higher clocker, higher consumption models. Dell (and Acer) were using them in normal size machines so they could slim down the machine and extend the batterylife which made sense given many people will find batterylife more useful than outright processor performance which wouldn't be used.

I bought a Dell 14z for my Mum's friend which was a 14in model and a C2D 1.4Ghz CULV processor, out of the box it had a solid eight hours of batterylife. As the processor produced less heat the cooling was nearly silent most of the time and in general use you'd never know it had a slower processor. As far as I'm aware the whole idea bombed completely as no-one managed to convince general consumers that it was worth paying the same for a seemingly slower processor. Hotukdeals is a pretty good measure of general consumers perceive items, CULV deals posted there were frequently slated for their 'rubbish' processors and pointing out deals with 'much faster' processors for the same price.

John

We are outnumbered by enemy titans, recommend aggressive sustained counterfire